Trump’s Secret Weapon: American Voters Living Overseas
Donald Trump is courting voters living outside of America by announcing his plan to stop the IRS from double taxing them.
In October, Donald Trump announced a bold strategy to end double taxation on American citizens living abroad. The impact could have a profound effect on those citizens, and could bring in a wave of votes from them. In a tight election that will come down to swing state margins, this could tip the scales in Trump’s favor.
The announcement appears via video on Trump’s website:
We're in a failing nation, and we're going to bring it back, and we're going to bring it back strong. Once and for all, I'm going to end double taxation on our Overseas Citizens.
You've been wanting this for years, and nobody has listened to you, and you deserve it, and I'm going to do it. It's the right thing to do, and no American leader has ever been willing to stand up and commit to you the way that I have on many things, but this is a very important element for your safety, security, and, frankly, for your wallet.
But I'm not like everyone else. I get things done. When I say it, I get things done. So, I'm going to get this done for you. It's a big one, ending double taxation, and you are going to be very happy when I'm back in office and get it done for you.
On the surface, this seems like a fringe issue that won’t affect a lot of people. But for the millions of Americans living outside of U.S. borders, ending the IRS filing requirements—when they already pay taxes in the nations in which they reside—means they no longer would have to pay taxes twice. Specifically, Americans living abroad would not have to pay tax on income derived from foreign sources, a relatively minuscule amount of IRS revenue. Not only do Americans living overseas often pay double the taxes, the overseas filings for the IRS can often burden them with complex and costly accounting bills.
This issue appears to have emboldened Trump’s anti-tax stances. He’s long said we should end income taxes on tips (which hurt generally lower socioeconomic workers) and on Social Security income (an obvious example of double taxation). Now he’s decided to take on another double taxation issue with Americans living abroad. The positive response he’s gotten from voters has even led him to “flirt” with what the New York Times calls “the ultimate tax cut”—ending the income tax outright.
The story of this secret weapon—and how it came about—have created political intrigue on both sides of the political spectrum.
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Millions of Voters Live Abroad
How many votes could this sway? The State Department estimates that around nine million Americans live abroad, with about 4.4 million of them eligible to vote. The Bureau of Consular Affairs published this infographic with interesting details in 2020:
David Bossie, sitting in as host of Steve Bannon’s War Room in September while Bannon served his bogus federal prison sentence, spoke of the importance of the potentially hundreds of thousands of overseas votes in a tight election, especially in light of tens of thousands of votes in three swing states having swung the 2020 electoral college:
Supporting tax reform could cause American voters overseas to turn out in droves to vote in favor of their pocketbooks. But how did this issue get on Trump’s radar? The radical leftist outlet, Daily Kos, sounded all the alarm bells after Trump’s announcement, which indicates the enormity of the problems it caused for the Democrats. Internal democratic sources also have revealed the extent of the panic.
The Daily Kos complained bitterly after Trump released his video announcement:
Trump’s pitch didn’t arise organically. In fact, it looks a lot like he made up this whole plank of his tax policy platform because basically one random Republican dude asked him to. Solomon Yue, who heads the advocacy group Republicans Overseas, bragged to the Wall Street Journal that he decided to approach Trump after seeing how willing Trump was to promise tax giveaways to everyone else.
That “random republican dude,” longtime RNC member Solomon Yue, has led the effort against taxation of Americans abroad for over a decade. Yue is the outgoing national committeeman for the Oregon Republican Party. Between his duties with the RNC and his position as Vice Chairman and CEO of Republicans Overseas, Yue has fought to get FATCA repealed since 2014. Republicans Overseas explains FATCA on its website:
FATCA is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act. FATCA was intended to prevent domestic Americans from illegally hiding their taxable wealth in foreign banks, but it has instead created significant hardships for law abiding overseas Americans.
FATCA requires foreign financial institutions (‘FFIs’) such as banks or investment companies to share overseas Americans’ financial data with the IRS. FFIs either sign up with the IRS to send the information directly or share the information with the host countries’ central tax authorities, who then pass it on to the IRS. There is no wealth threshold for the collection of this financial information: if you are an American citizen with an overseas account, then information on that account—no matter the amount of money it contains—will be collected and shared with the IRS. The information collected by the FFIs would require a warrant if gathered on domestic US citizens.
As with almost everything involving the IRS, it started innocently enough, but the very authorization for it to collect private financial information weaponized it against American citizens.
Yue, born into slavery in Mao’s China, became an ardent anti-communist conservative when he came to America. As such, he doesn’t take kindly to government agencies spying on private activities of its citizens. He has also directed significant personal capital towards getting Republicans elected.
Democrats Panic
The announcement of Trump’s intention to end double taxation of Americans overseas has set off a veritable panic among the Biden-Harris administration. The campaign apparatus already sunk resources into registering voters overseas and courting their votes. The panic caused by Trump’s announcement led the White House to assemble a hastily organized Zoom conference for voters overseas on October 24. The content underwhelmed and failed to stop the momentum of foreign voters shifting hard to the Trump camp.
Yue posted on X/Twitter that Trump is “winning the overseas vote bigtime!!!”
.@realDonaldTrump is winning the overseas vote big time!!! Why? #CopyCatMala White House is hosting the FIRST EVER AMERICANS ABROAD STAKEHOLDER CALL. It is historical. In political warfare, one shouldn't react to her enemy's offense - ending the double taxation of overseas… pic.twitter.com/4FpsBkGKss
— Solomon Yue (@SolomonYue) October 24, 2024
It didn't seem to help.
FAIL: AMERICANS ABROAD STAKEHOLDER CALL.
— JC Double Taxed 🇦🇺 🇺🇸 END Double Taxation (@JCDoubleTaxed) October 24, 2024
I hear at the start the panel mentioned that tax was a hot issue for #AmericansAbroad
THEN they refused to approach double taxation & over-regulation.@TheDemocrats @VP @DemsAbroad @ACAVoice @arro @FAWCOhttps://t.co/7XZR7oEu12
The call was organized by the White House and featured low-level federal staffers. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were notably absent. Jaime Citron of the White House Office of Public Management served as host, and the call lasted a little under half an hour. Citron called it “historic,” and the “first of many such calls” that they will conduct for overseas Americans. Brianne Maruaha of the State Department came on to announce the recent relaunch of the Smart Traveler Program, with online resources for Americans traveling abroad. Then Rebecca Thompson, a Department of Treasury staffer, came on to discuss “stakeholder engagement” for the IRS with new online tools they’ve launched. She made sure to chide everyone that any of the benefits available on their website were only available if you file your taxes with the IRS, and that you must report all your taxable income. Then, in something of a non sequitur, another staffer named Kate Balcerzak came on to announce National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s new memo discussing AI security.
During a very brief question-and-answer period at the end, a question got through from someone living in London about the double taxation issue. Thompson appeared prepared for this, replying that they had no power to deal with the issue. Any fix would need to come from Congress before they could change any rules.
It sounded suspiciously like the excuse the Biden-Harris administration likes to use to explain why they can’t close the border.
Yue called the event a nothingburger. "The word salad chef Harris didn't even show up for the call,” he said in an interview. “Expats want President Trump's ending double taxation, not e-filing. The Zoom call won't end Harris' hemorrhaging of the overseas vote. It might increase the hemorrhaging."
Democrats Can’t Control the Damage
Multiple anonymous sources reached for this story say the Democrats thought they could win overseas votes by announcing a plan to get Congress to pass a law allowing e-filing for overseas taxpayers. The announcement by Trump that he wants to end their IRS filing altogether completely blew that plan apart. Those sources said the DNC and other affiliated groups had invested significant resources in a get out the vote operation for those voters. Internal estimates by democrat operatives indicated Trump got somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million in earned media value by making this announcement. It got picked up by major media outlets all over the globe, creating big waves in overseas financial reporting.
As with everything else surrounding the Harris-Walz campaign, Donald Trump has once again caught them flat-footed and put them into damage control mode. A perceived democrat strength—overseas votes—has suddenly and dramatically shifted to the advantage of the Republicans. Ten thousand overseas voters in a swing state could dramatically affect the outcome of the Electoral College, thereby building on Trump’s momentum as we close out this election cycle.
Trump has also hit on a core issue that fundamentally affects all Americans—the deep unfairness of the IRS and our broken tax code. As the New York Times might say, he began flirting with the issue, and when voters overwhelmingly responded to him, he realized how big a solution he could advocate. The Democrats simply cannot win on this issue. Everyone hates the IRS, even Democrats.
Imagine if ending our unfair tax code wins Trump the election, and he can find success executing on that plan. That would, to paraphrase Barack Obama, fundamentally transform America.
(READ MORE: How Many States are Still Withholding Voter Data from the Public?)